Virginia

February has been a hellish month for my home state of Virginia. The state has been hit with a storm of scandals that have rocked the political hierarchy. First, there was the revelation that Governor Ralph Northam had worn blackface in the past when a photo surfaced from his medical yearbook. He offered an apology but then came a reversal, as Northam ignored calls for his resignation. Another admittance of blackface followed suit by a different top state leader — Attorney General Mark Herring. And on top of all this, Lieutenant Governor Justin E. Fairfax, Northam’s designated successor, faced two allegations of past sexual assault during the same week. (The Governor, Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General rank in the top five most powerful leaders in the Virginia state government — all three positions are currently held by Democrats clouded in scandal). While the sexual assault allegations add to the ongoing conversation during this #MeToo era, the blackface confessions have reignited conversations about racism we thought we no longer needed. All of this happened during African-American history month. Virginia is not doing well.

An Inescapable History

The magnitude of the state’s systemic history of racism and mistreatment of African-Americans cannot be summarized in a few paragraphs. It is a shameful and ongoing story stained with centuries of slavery, slews of Jim Crow laws and the 2017 white nationalist rally that turned deadly. The remnants are there: I often drive on what was, until recently, known as Jefferson Davis Highway or spot Confederate flags around me. On the capital’s main road, Monument Avenue, enormous statues of Confederate soldiers cast haunting shadows down at passersby, reminding them of a not-so-distant past.

Yet my state has come a long way, and it is one I am proud to call home. Virginia regards itself as a political outlier in the South and a vessel of change of which Ralph Northam has often been the captain. College Democrats member Jacob Maguire ’21 noted the commendable shift in Virginia politics in the past 10 years, citing the three Democratic women who were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives this year as evidence of Virginia’s growing progressivism. The state supported Barack Obama twice and Hillary Clinton for president and elected America’s first ever elected black governor in 1985.

Virginia runs through my blood. Both of my parents attended the University of Virginia, my siblings went to college in-state and my sister’s boyfriend is a student at the medical school Northam attended. This progressive yet historic place raised me — it is where I caught lighting bugs and relished snow days, visited presidents’ estates and waited for Septembers to come. Our state motto is “Virginia is for Lovers,” an ethos sadly incongruent with hateful acts like Northam’s. As Virginia faces intense scrutiny for a dismal past, I find myself reexamining my perception of the state as a progressive-minded “New South” haven. But in all this darkness I am desperately searching for some tint of light. Ergo, I seek to find a silver lining from these heartbreaking headlines from Virginia.

What is Blackface?

Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used by performers, often white, to represent a caricature of an African American. In 2019 (as well as in 1984 when Northam acknowledges donning blackface for a Michael Jackson costume), society largely understands that blackface is unambiguously racist. For most, however, this is where our knowledge ceases. The offence is often tucked away, better kept where we do not have to see its blatant racial ugliness. It is usually not in our textbooks; rarely do students learn much about it in schools. But if any good can come out of Virginia’s current disaster, it will be a recognition and increased education about blackface and its existence in the past and present. As we condemn Northam and Herring for racism, it is important we do justice to our testimony and educate ourselves about the practice and why it is such a painful mark on African American history.

Blackface minstrelsy emerged in the United States in the 1830s and quickly became a popular form of entertainment in the country during the 19th century. The theatrical form was central to “how white Americans came into their own identity and worked through what it means to be white,” explained Kellen Hoxworth, a postdoctoral fellow in theater at Dartmouth. Hoxworth researches the history of blackface and his current book project, entitled “Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, and Performance,” traces the formation of blackface…

RICHMOND, VA (WWBT) – It’s been a tumultuous few weeks for Virginia with the commonwealth’s top three officials embroiled each embroiled in separate scandals.

Here is a minute-by-minute timeline of the political controversies that have put the commonwealth in the national spotlight.

Gov. Ralph Northam defends proposed bill loosening restrictions on abortion in an interview with WTOP and says, “It’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s non-viable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

5:15 p.m. – Republican General Assembly leaders call on Northam to provide an “immediate explanation.” Over the next hour, the call is echoed by other political leaders.

~ 6 p.m. – A photo from a 1981 VMI yearbook with Northam’s nickname listed as “Coonman” begins to circulate on social media.

10:56 p.m. – Virginia Legislative Black Caucus said it met with Northam and calls on his resignation saying, “it is clear he can no longer effectively serve as governor.”

2:29 p.m. – Capitol Police say two people were arrested outside the Governor’s Mansion earlier in the day.

2:45 p.m. – Northam says, “I darkened my face” while participating in a dance contest for which he learned to moonwalk to portray Michael Jackson.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel doesn’t agree with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that if President Trump can declare a national emergency to bypass Congress in order to secure funding for his long-promised border wall, a Democratic president can do the same for guns.

“The one thing you don’t want to mimic … their politics,” Emanuel said during a guest appearance Friday on HBO’s’ Real Time with Bill Maher. “He [Trump] wants you on certain cases to actually mimic what he’s doing because then there’s a difference of nothing. That’s not where you want to go against him.”

The conversation quickly moved on to other topics without a mention of Friday’s deadly workplace shooting in Aurora, Ill., that ended with six dead, including the gunman, and several wounded police officers.

WASHINGTON — As Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam resisted calls to resign over a racist photo that appeared under his name in his medical school year book, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax remains in the wings as the man who would replace him if Northam were to step down.

Northam denied on Saturday that he was either person in a photograph that showed one person in blackface and another wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe. The governor said he had “darkened’ his face with shoe polish for a Michael Jackson costume in 1984, however.

While Northam apologized and asked for forgiveness on Saturday, he also noted that he maintained a good relationship with Fairfax, who would be America’s fifth-ever black governor were he to take Northam’s place.

“Justin and I have a very, very close relationship,” Northam said at the press conference Saturday. “He has been very supportive … he is a wonderful person.”

On Saturday, Fairfax released a statement saying he was “shocked and saddened” by the images that appeared in Northam’s yearbook.

“The Governor needed to apologize, and I am glad that he did so,” Fairfax said. “He also reached out to me personally to express his sincere regrets and to apologize.”

He added that the two have worked closely for many years. “He has been a friend to me and has treated my family and me with hospitality and respect,” Fairfax said.

Fairfax said despite Northam’s career of service to American children, soldiers and constituents, he could not condone the governor’s actions from his past.

“Now more than ever, we must make decisions in the best interests of the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia,” he concluded.

Fairfax, 39, was only the second African-American elected statewide in Virginia when he won the post alongside Northam in 2017.

The Duke and Columbia-educated lawyer has been a rising star in the party since making his first run for office 2013, after serving as a federal prosecutor in the high-profile Eastern District of Virginia.

Fairfax lost that first campaign for attorney general in a Democratic primary, but…

It’s 400 years since the ship carrying the first African slaves to America docked on the coast of Virginia, beginning a process that would see millions of black people forced into servitude.

The state has spent the better part of a decade planning for 2019 to be a solemn remembrance, with a series of exhibitions and ceremonies aimed at recognizing that dark past, and looking to a more inclusive future.

But in the space of a week all that endeavor has been forced into the background, with Virginia’s leaders instead seemingly engaged in a bid to singlehandedly revive the art of blackface.

Blackface, #MeToo and moonwalking: how Virginia self-destructed in a week

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Ralph Northam, Virginia’s governor, kicked things off when he admitted to being in a college yearbook photo that showed a man in blackface next to a man in a Ku Klux Klan outfit. As Virginia, and soon the nation, reeled from that revelation, Northam then denied he was in the image, but said he had indeed worn blackface in the past, to impersonate Michael Jackson during a dance competition.

As the governor clung on, the state’s attorney general Mark Herring, the man third in line to replace Northam should he have to quit, confessed to his own dalliances with blackface. Herring said he had worn “dark makeup” while dressing as the rapper Kurtis Blow.

As much of the nation has looked on in horror, all three men have refused to resign. Many have been stunned by the efforts of Northam and Herring to attempt to place into context their blackface makeup shenanigans. Both have cited their age at the time – Northam was 25, Herring was 19 – and that the incidents occurred in the 1980s, as providing some sort of reasonable explanation. But others have pointed out that 25 years old is not that young, and 1980 was not that long ago.

Still, for all the surprise outside, and inside, the state, many say they are not shocked.

“For me the scariest part is – and this has been said in the black community for decades – what happened this past week was that things we know exist came to the surface,” said Francesca Leigh-Davis, who co-hosts the RVA Dirt local politics radio show in Richmond, the Virginia state capital.

Leigh-Davis and her RVA Dirt co-hosts, Melissa Vaughn and Jessee Perry, organized a demonstration outside the governor’s mansion. Scores of people held signs and chanted “Northam has got to go” as the governor held a news conference inside – where he told reporters about his shoe-polish-assisted Michael Jackson impression.

Northam hasn’t been seen in public since. He has resisted calls from Democrats, including the Virginia legislative black caucus and candidates for the White House, to resign, and has hired a crisis communications firm.

To the outsider, Virginia has been moving left politically over the past decade, to the extent that some have mused whether the state, which brushes up against Washington, DC, in the north-east, should even still be considered part of ‘The South’, in the parlance of the US civil war.

The state elected Douglas Wilder, the first African American to serve as governor in the US since reconstruction, in 1989. More recently, Virginia voted for Barack Obama in 2008 – the first time the state had pledged for a Democrat in the White House in more than 40 years, and backed Obama again in 2012. In 2016 Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 5% in the state.

But Cornell Brooks, a Virginia resident and former president of the NAACP, and a…

RICHMOND, Va. — L. Douglas Wilder, a grandson of slaves, became America’s first elected black governor 30 years ago, winning in Virginia in part by finessing the racist history of the state that is now roiling its politics once more.

To succeed as a black candidate in 1989, Mr. Wilder had to patiently accommodate the one-time segregationist Democrats and the state’s Lost Cause Confederate heritage. He had to win over some of the foes who had defeated his attempt to establish a state holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He had to appear in proximity to the Confederate monuments that dot courthouse lawns and Civil War battlefields across Virginia without raising a whisper.

In the end, Mr. Wilder won by less than one-half of 1 percent of the vote — far closer than polls indicated he would. His white Democratic running mate, tellingly, won by a far greater margin. Still, as John Warner, the former Republican senator of Virginia, put it recently, “It was a monumental chapter not just in Virginia history but in American history.”

The revelations of not-so-long-ago racist behavior by top leaders, which turned the Capitol into a veritable soundstage for a mind-bending political thriller over the last week, are testing the state’s image as a progressive-minded, New South beacon that backed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for president.

With the political crisis showing few signs of abating — Virginia’s Democratic congressional delegation renewed calls Thursday night for Mr. Northam to resign — the major question is how willing Virginia’s leaders and voters are to punish the transgressions of a younger Mr. Northam and Mr. Herring for behavior from a less-enlightened era before Mr. Wilder’s election.

“We’re going to have to have a greater understanding all-around of what Virginia was like, and I’m not sure today’s standards should go back 30 to 40 years ago, when people were in college,” said Jerry Kilgore, a former state attorney general.

In truth, the firestorm over blackface photos is only the latest example of Virginia suffering humiliations over racism that cause pain to its residents and tarnish its well-burnished reputation. The state’s ample self-regard has suffered blow after blow, in part because of its unwillingness to fully reckon with a past that, while not as violent toward its black citizens, was no less ugly than its Deep South brethren.

In 2006, then-Senator George F. Allen, a Republican, stumbled into the national spotlight by pointing a finger at an Indian-American Democrat videotaping his campaign appearance and referring to the tracker as “macaca,” a slur for dark-skinned Africans.

Woman claims she was raped by Justin Fairfax in 2000 while they were both students at Duke University; Trace Gallagher reports. #YourWorld #FoxNews

FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as political and business news. The number one network in cable, FNC has been the most watched television news channel for more than 16 years and according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll, is the most trusted television news source in the country. Owned by 21st Century Fox, FNC is available in more than 90 million homes and dominates the cable news landscape, routinely notching the top ten programs in the genre.

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring admits to wearing blackface during a college party in 1980 in a revelation that further roils the top levels of the state government.

FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as political and business news. The number one network in cable, FNC has been the most watched television news channel for more than 16 years and according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll, is the most trusted television news source in the country. Owned by 21st Century Fox, FNC is available in more than 90 million homes and dominates the cable news landscape, routinely notching the top ten programs in the genre.

Eastern Virginia Medial School holds a news conference to discuss the investigation into Governor Ralph Northam’s unacceptable photos in the student yearbook.

FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as political and business news. The number one network in cable, FNC has been the most watched television news channel for more than 16 years and according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll, is the most trusted television news source in the country. Owned by 21st Century Fox, FNC is available in more than 90 million homes and dominates the cable news landscape, routinely notching the top ten programs in the genre.